Lisette's List (44 page)

S
PRING
. A
PRICOT TREES BLOSSOMING
with pinkish-white petals like flakes of the moon, and plum blossoms like the down of swans filled our nostrils with sweetness as Maxime and I walked to the bories. Along the roadside, wild purple irises lifted their regal heads. I felt a bashful pride that Maxime was finally seeing the Vaucluse in its glory. I only hoped a mistral would not blow through. In spring they were the most fierce. Everything seemed to have its opposite—sweetness and harshness. Yet with the spring came asparagus and sweet peas and my delicate, pendulous haricots verts, and, along with them, hope that things would right themselves.

Searching the bories was hard work—lifting off those flat stones that covered ovens and replacing them. From time to time, we rested on stone slabs and leaned our backs against the walls.

“I have decided that the primitive people who lived in bories had to have had some sort of language,” I said. “To express wonder about mysteries. The phases of the moon. Bird calls. Rain. The mistral. Language was the only way they could confront the mysteries together. They must have hungered to understand them.”

“What other hungers did they have?” he asked.

I thought awhile. “The hunger to explain themselves. Actions can so easily be misunderstood.”

At that, Bernard leapt into my thoughts. What was I to understand about the time when he’d pinned me down among the pomegranates until it appeared that he was appalled by his own actions, then helped me up? What was in him that had prevented him from
taking advantage of me right there in the road? What had possessed him to be so gentle in washing the blood off my leg, or in taking tender care of me in the Sentier des Ocres? Yet he had grabbed my arm forcefully when he’d asked me to go to Paris with him. If he were more articulate, maybe then I could understand him. As it was, whatever made him have such contrary natures was a mystery to me.

Maxime said, “Misunderstanding is exactly why people need words to communicate their feelings.”

Exactly, I thought.

“Like
thank you
. And
I’m hurting
,” he added, a mere whisper.

“And like
I’m sorry
,” I said.

At that moment I realized that even
with
language, we struggle to say the unsayable. “Maybe that’s why we have art,” I ventured.

“But art alone can’t tell the whole story. We need words to explain
why
that woman’s tears burst out of her eyes like bullets in Picasso’s painting. It requires context in order to be understood fully.”

That was obvious in the case of the Picasso painting, but in everyday life, sometimes it wasn’t obvious.

“We also need words to help along our hungers,” I said, conscious of changing the drift of conversation.

He regarded me quizzically. “For example?”

“The hunger to be touched can be augmented by the word
please
. Please.”

His hand came to rest on mine, and after a while, he murmured, “Imagine them falling asleep close together, those early people. Peacefully, in utter darkness, with a dome of stone above them.”

“Or in front of their borie in summer, under the dome of the sky.”

“Sprinkled with lights,” he added.

“It must have given them a sense of the infinite,” I said.

“And of their own smallness and vulnerability.” He moved so his
body was against mine and put his arm around me. “Being vulnerable together is less frightening than being vulnerable alone.”

I
T WOULD BE WRONG
to say that we found nothing that day, even though we came home without a painting.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I told Maxime my idea that the hiding places might represent aspects particular to the region. I had convinced myself that there had to be a painting in a borie even though we hadn’t found one in the borie village. Maybe that was too far from Roussillon. I mentioned that in the fields nearby, miniature bories used as toolsheds and shelters by farmers had wooden doors with hinges bolted into the stone. We set out on a long amble down dirt farm roads and found that they had no padlocks. How trusting were the country folk.

After investigating more than a dozen, Maxime said, “No more, Lisette. I can barely drag my feet.”

“Oh, please, just one more.”

Up the road a short distance, a path led to a small borie in the middle of a field of broad-leafed melon plants. The door had been painted the coral color of the flesh of cantaloupes, a Roussillon hue.

“That one. Look. It’s special. I promise. It will be the last.”

We stepped carefully between mounded rows of plants, found the door unlocked, and ducked inside. Cézanne’s panoramic landscape astonished us. It wasn’t even covered. It had been propped up in front of the handles of shovels and hoes, as if the farmer wanted to see it every time he opened the door.

“If this farmer loves it this much, I hate to take it from him,” I said.

“Don’t get sentimental. It’s rightfully yours, Lisette. This art-loving farmer could be the thief.”

Maxime brought it out into the sunlight. It displayed so much of
Provence—cultivated fields dotted with ochre farmhouses, a string of distant buff-colored arches of a Roman bridge, a narrow country road, tall pine trees on the left, their trunks bare, with foliage only at their tops, and the grand Montagne Sainte-Victoire in the distance, a pale lavender monolith, triangular and imposing.

I changed my mind about André’s favorite painting. This was so beautiful, so true to the region, that it had to have been his favorite. “Look, André!” I shouted to the sky. “Your favorite.”

Behind us we heard someone approach, startling us. I spun around to face a farmer.

“Bonjour,”
Maxime said.

The man dipped his head in a nod, a slight gesture. “Adieu.”

That disconcerted Maxime, since he didn’t know the custom here.

“
S’il vous plaît
, monsieur, do you own this field?” I asked.

“That I do.”

“And this little borie?”

“Mine too. For my tools.”

We introduced ourselves and learned that his name was Claude and that he had painted the door to match the flesh of his cantaloupes. I liked his self-expression.

“We apologize for trespassing,” I said. “We have been looking for a painting that we believed was hidden in the area.”

Deep lines appeared in his tanned, leathery cheeks. “Then I conclude that you have arrived at the right place,” he said, gazing sadly at the painting.

Maxime explained, “We found it in your toolshed.”

“So did I one day.”

“Do you have any idea how it got there?”

“Strike me dead if I know. It just strolled in one night, as far as I can tell. It’s been here for a few years.”

“Do you know who put it there?”

“
Bof!
How can I know? Somebody needing to hide it, I’m guessing. Did you put it there?”

“No, but the painting belongs to me.”

The slow realization of parting with it seeped into his old eyes.

“Then you must have it, madame, but be sure I’ll miss it fierce. It always made me content, seeing it there when I opened the door of a morning and the light angled in over it. It’s mighty pretty, to my mind.”

“Yes, I agree. Thank you for protecting it.”

He took a hoe from the shed. “Adieu,” he said and shuffled away.

Baffled, amused, and a touch saddened, we walked home quietly in the somber, pale, end-of-day light.

“I
LOVE THIS ONE,
” I said that evening, seeing it framed and hanging on the north wall. We’d had to move Chagall’s painting over in order to put the landscape exactly where Pascal had hung it near the dining table.

“You love all of them.”

“Not like this one. This one I tried to imagine when I was looking at the view through the outhouse window.”

“Yes, well, don’t you see? That view is your own. You own it. You relate to it in all seasons of the year. In just that way, Cézanne owned this view.” Maxime’s voice became soft. “He must have coaxed the landscape to reveal its secrets to him, its hills and folds. It was his act of love that passed into expression.”

“Listening to Pascal, I came to think that Cézanne was some sort of mystic.”

“Perhaps you could say that. He didn’t just see nature. He contemplated the
idea
of nature. To him, Montagne Sainte-Victoire represented the pristine natural purity of the earth. Seeing only the tip of this mountain, like an iceberg, like you see here, he imagined its geological root. It was for him a descent into time before human culture, beneath centuries of superficial civilization.”

I couldn’t grasp all that Maxime was saying, but I surely did
understand the slope of Claude’s shoulders and the angle of his downcast head as he had walked away with his hoe.

“All of what you just said is in this painting?”

“In all of his paintings of the mountain, to one degree or another. This one has to be an early painting of the valley and mountain, but the more he worked on this subject, the more abstract his work became—less of a depiction and more of a pattern of geometric shapes done in broader brushstrokes.”

“So is this early one inferior?”

“Not at all. It’s just early. But his later paintings show that the geometric shapes of his landscapes opened the way for Picasso and others to use flat, hard-edged forms to depict a figure.”

“Like our stick drawings on the courtyard wall!”

“If you like.” He smiled at the notion.

“Then these paintings really are a trail of the history of art, like Marc Chagall said.”

“Once you find the Picasso, if it truly is a Picasso, they are.”

“But Chagall doesn’t fit in.”

“Yes, he does. At the end. The
visible
reality expressed through the handling of light and color of Impressionism—Pissarro—moved into the solid geometric shapes of Postimpressionism—Cézanne—to the modernism of distortion and Cubism—Picasso—and finally to the postmodernism of the expression of the
invisible
personal reality of dreams. That’s Chagall. You have an important historic collection here, one that should never be dismantled.”

My thoughts flew to Pascal. Had he understood that?

“Besides the Picasso, there are still two paintings missing. Pissarro’s red roofs and the first one Pascal acquired, of the girl and her goat on the ochre path in Louveciennes. I have lived that painting, Max. Remembering it kept me going during the Occupation years.”

“They’ll turn up.”

“So you say now. I don’t know where else to look.”

“But you
will
keep searching.”

“Of course. It may not mean much to anyone else, but to me, the Louveciennes is a painting of Geneviève and me.”

“Ah. You think it’s personal now, just from memory? Believe me, when you find it, the more you study it face-to-face, and the more private, the more personal, the more singular the experience becomes, the deeper it will enter your soul. You watch. It can’t be forced, but if you are patient, it will happen to you, and you will awaken in front of that painting with new eyes and with unexpected appreciations. When that happens, it transcends the personal. That’s when you will know that it’s a great painting.”

“Oh, Maxime, I can hardly wait to see it.”

“Does that mean you won’t come to Paris again until you find it?”

I hesitated a moment too long, and Maxime pulled his bottom lip behind his new front teeth.

“I don’t know. It’s possible that I won’t come permanently even after I find it.” My words surprised me. I had to continue gently. “It’s complicated. You remember Josephine Baker’s song ‘J’Ai Deux Amours,’ don’t you?
‘Mon pays et Paris’
? My
countryside
is Provence. My people are not just Parisians anymore. They are
Provençaux
too. I have expanded, Max. Now I can sing, ‘I have two loves, my village and Paris.’ I’m not ready to choose. I may never be ready.”

A shadow passed over his eyes and darkened them into some unidentifiable, watery, frightening color of hurt.

O
N
M
AXIME
’
S LAST EVENING
we walked up to the Castrum, the highest point at the north end of the village, just as Bernard’s house was the highest point south of the village. Our conversation grew quiet in preparation for the spectacle to come. In the foothills below, not a leaf fluttered in Émile Vernet’s cherry orchard, but high above
us, the wispy wave of a silken Parisian scarf, all peachy and rose, gave evidence of subtle currents of air.

Lingering as long as it could, sunset’s sad joy filmed over the day with a delicate blush as our dear earth turned and the mighty sphere slipped below our sight behind Gordes to astonish the Azores. We squeezed each other’s hand, knowing we had no choice but to let it go, and stood very still until the western sky exploded in tangerine fire and slowly settled itself to mauve, and finally to a dusk of great beauty, soft as eiderdown. If anything could heal, it was such a dusk after a day of glory. Holding each other, we dallied until the sky became unfathomable ink. With our faces up, we watched the universe wheel, dazzling us with its immensity. A shooting star took us by surprise.

“Did you see that?” I cried.

“Yes.”

“Did you
feel
it?”

“Yes.”

That a spark of the universe had leapt for joy at that exact instant was beyond our wildest expectations, but for now, that we had both witnessed it together in a moment of unity—that was enough. We turned for home.

A
S WE CLIMBED THE STAIRS
, Maxime’s hands clasping my hips behind me, he chuckled and said, “Like Monsieur et Madame Borieman.”

“Like Rodin’s lovers,” I said.

“Like Maxime and Lisette.”

He followed me into my bedrooom. There was no question of what we would do.

We indulged our shy curiosities, greeting each bared revelation of each other with kisses and light caresses, coaxing the landscape of our bodies to reveal their secrets in their hills and folds. Always
asking with a look and a pause, we delighted in our findings, uttering soft, grateful noises, answering them with tender advances. Need carried us on, moving us as one. From first touch to peaceful sleep, all was harmony, all solicitude, all love.